


After Death, Oblivion

by EllaStorm



Category: Historical RPF, SHAKESPEARE William - Works, Will (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Crying, Deep Philosophical Conversations About Death, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, M/M, Post Season 1, Romeo and Juliet References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 14:03:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16855345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllaStorm/pseuds/EllaStorm
Summary: Since Alice left, Will has fallen into an ale-filled writer’s mania that leads him to some dark places. Figures that it takes someone who’s already been there to catch him.





	After Death, Oblivion

**Author's Note:**

> "If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do."
> 
> \- Angel, 2x16 "Epiphany"

Two months. It could have been twenty. It could have been two-hundred, going by the threadbareness of Alice’s letter that his fingers had worn down for hours at a time, the ancient-looking crumple of the paper, folded, carried, unfolded, almost tossed away, stashed, lost, recovered, kept in a pocket over a painfully beating heart.

_Promise you will not go looking for me. I am happy._

Will pushed the document away and took another swig of ale. It was warm and bitter and revolting, not unlike the meandering, purposeless thing in his chest that forced his hands and eyes to Alice’s letter again and again.

He had sought refuge in hating her for leaving, but abstained from it when he had noticed that hating had not stopped him from loving her still, loving her more, a paradox that he had scribbled down in the wee hours of an early morning on dully lit paper, exhausting pages with a monologue to a play he hadn’t known he’d meant to write.

_That I must love a loathed enemy._

Words had always been inside him, searching for a way out, be it spoken or written, and now, in this three-week-tumble of drunkenness and despair, they seemed to flow ever faster, like a river spilling over and drowning fields, then cattle, then men.

He rested his quill a moment later, reading over the latest, half-dried undulations of ink put down on pages filled with his handwriting.

_Shall I believe that unsubstantial death is amorous, and that the lean abhorrent monster keeps thee here in dark to be thy paramour?_

A slight nausea crept up Will’s throat, and he resolutely picked the offending sheet off the table. The whole world twisted and turned as he stumbled to his feet and he had to hold on to the mantle of the fireplace next to him not to fall down, while the paper in his hand wrinkled up with an almost demure noise, as though it wished to accept its fate of being cast away into the burning logs in a dignified way.

It never came to that, though, since a long, elegant hand grabbed hold of Will’s wrist and pulled it back.

“It would be a crime to burn the works of the greatest playwright in London, don’t you think?”

Will’s inebriated gaze dropped to the floor, before it rose again, along thin, leather-clad legs, a black, shimmering coat, up to a shadow-cut jawline and questioning blue eyes that seemed all too soft to belong to the person Will knew possessed them. Christopher Marlowe was a snake, a provocateur, a dagger in the dark that cut deep and deadly. Christopher Marlowe never looked _soft_.

“Says who?”

“The other greatest playwright in London,” Marlowe gave back with the hint of a smile.

His hand uncurled Will’s fist from the paper, and Will let it happen, let him take it and stroke it back to smoothness and read its contents with furrowed eyebrows. When Marlowe looked back up at Will, something in his eyes had changed, a glint of the familiar hardness reappearing, and Will was almost glad for it.

“Though it seems you meant to burn yourself rather than your play.”

Will gave a mirthless laugh. “Did I now?”

“I know despair when I see it,” Marlowe retorted, and Will suddenly remembered him bursting into his abode with a torn-up face just a few weeks ago, demanding to find Southwell, and God.

Before Will knew what was happening, Marlowe had collected his papers from the table and clenched them under one arm, using the other to lay around Will’s waist, propping him up with a strength that was surprising for his thin body. He was warm and smelled faintly of spices, Will noticed.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking you and your drunken despair home.”

Will looked up at his face, but Marlowe’s eyes, as so often, revealed nothing.

“Why would I trust you, Marlowe?” he managed. He realised that his words sounded washed-out, like they reflected the truth of a former self, not this one.

“Call me Kit, will you?” Marlowe said not without exhaustion, as if they’d had this conversation many times over. Maybe they had.

“Why would I trust you, Kit?”

“Why would you trust yourself?”  
And that, indeed, was that.

 

 

***

 

 

Will woke with a headache less splitting than he’d presumed, to a bed less familiar than he’d hoped. The surroundings soon made it clear that he had slept in Marlowe’s dwellings, but the presence of his clothes and the absence of the man himself from the bed confirmed that Will had not been taken advantage of. Not that he had really feared that would happen. Maybe he had hoped it a little, though. Raging against Marlowe might have been able to temporarily fill the void in his chest.

He sat up and let his eyes wander through the room. Apart from the bed, a few items of clothing on the floor and jewellery negligently tossed onto what looked like a vanity, the most interesting object in the room was a desk right under a skylight, scattered with paper sheets and inkwells. Curious, Will got up. When his feet touched the hardwood floor he found that Marlowe must have freed him of his boots last night, and the idea of the accompanying eyeroll brought a smile to his face. Leaving his discarded footwear to wherever it might be now, he marched over to the desk and found, on it, his own documents from last night, carefully stacked on top of each other. He pulled Alice’s letter out between them, ignoring the sting to his chest, folded it up and stuffed it back into the pocket of his overgarment.

Incidentally, Will’s eyes fell on another sheet on the table, written on in an unfamiliar hand. Marlowe’s letters were sharp and accurate, functional, leaving all shape of beauty to the words they were forming.

_…my rude pen can hardly blazon forth the loves of men, much less of powerful gods. Let it suffice that my slack Muse sings of Leander’s eyes, those orient cheeks and lips_

The writing stopped there and Will felt himself blush a little. He knew of Marlowe’s preferences – the whole of London knew of them – but to see his desires so clearly laid out before him gave him the feeling that he was trespassing into the man’s soul, a place where he had no business being.

“I don’t think I’ll finish it,” Marlowe’s – _Kit’s_ – voice sounded from the door, and Will startled up from his contemplations. Kit was leaning sideways against the frame, clad in the same trousers from the evening before, but lacking for a shirt. The ink on his chest shifted and moved with his muscles as he pushed himself off and stalked towards Will with the lasciviousness of a feline predator. If Will hadn’t had the evidence, he would never have deemed him the same man that had led him to his home, put him to bed, pulled off his boots and wrapped him in a blanket just a few hours ago.

“Why not?” Will’s mouth was dry, and he didn’t think it was all the residual ale’s fault, when Kit stopped before him and reached around him to grab the paper with the poem from the desk.

“They have a terrible fate, Hero and Leander. He drowns. She jumps off a tower. Why does it always have to end in tragedy?”

Kit turned his back, reading over his own lines again, before he sat down on the bed with a sigh.

“Because it always _ends,_ ” Will said, and the letter in his pocket felt like a physical weight for a moment, forcing him down.

Kit’s eyes left the poem and focused on Will with renewed intensity. “Now you’ve answered your own question.” He threw his paper on the sheets and rested his chin in his palms, barely-hidden interest in his expression. “What about your play? How does it end?”

“Which one?” Will knew that feigning ignorance had never gotten him very far with Kit Marlowe, but trying and failing was better than not trying at all.

“ _I’ll bury thee in a triumphant grave; A grave? Oh no! a lantern, slaughter’d youth, for here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes this vault a feasting presence full of light._ Et cetera, et cetera.”

“You’ve read it.”  
“I’ve read what you had with you, yes.”

Will made an attempt at justified outrage towards this violation of his very private, unfinished work; but since _he_ had just gone through Kit’s very private, unfinished work, his attempt fell rather flat.

“I’ll tell you how it ends,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Romeo commits suicide over Juliet’s sleeping body that he thinks lifeless. Juliet wakes up, sees her dead lover and kills herself with his sword.”

“How uplifting.”

“Life is not uplifting.”

“At least according to every artist who ever wrote a tragedy.” Kit sighed. “I think I shall do something radically different, then. Ending _Hero and Leander_ with the two of them blissfully in bed together, for example.”

Will raised his eyebrows. “And how will that matter to the people who read it? They all know how the story goes. They all know the heroes are going to die. Whether you write it so or not is of no import.”

“And that’s where I have to disagree, dear William. It _absolutely_ matters what we decide to do with other people’s stories. How do you think the Bible was written? Not that I know more than bare rudiments about that particular subject.”

“Still, you have only changed the _story_ , Kit. Not the lives and deaths of Hero, or Leander, or David, or Jesus.”

“Stories change lives,” Kit gave back with a small smile. “You of all should know that.”

Will thought of Topcliffe, and _Richard III_ , and Alice’s tortured body, and his jaw clenched.

“Not the lives of the people who live them.”

“Yet many who live have made stories of their lives. Some of them, people say, have even survived their own deaths.”

“And still, death comes, in the end, and after death, oblivion.”

Kit said nothing, and Will huffed. A sudden bout of anger had taken hold of him, that he didn’t know how to shake, and his feet carried him from one end of the room to the other, a tiger in a cage, until the bitter words escaped his mouth.

“So what is the point of changing a story, changing a life with a story, even changing a life _into_ a story, when it all comes down to death in the end! When it all comes down to nothing!”

There was a long pause before Kit answered.

“Spoke the faithful to the faithless.”

Will wanted to say something in return, but his vision blurred and the words got stuck in his throat, and before he knew it he was on his knees in Christopher Marlowes bedroom, sobbing like a child. He was caught by a warm hand at his temple, an arm around his shoulders, and his tears soon fell into the bare crook of a neck that smelled of spices and sweat and worn leather. Kit Marlowe was surrounding him, whispering things like prayers into Will’s ear, _we make our own meaning, we make our own fate, death like faith is but a state of mind._ And then he stopped speaking, and simply let Will cry, until the flow of tears ceased.

“She’s gone, isn’t she? Alice?”

Will felt the familiar sting in his chest, and he reluctantly disengaged himself from Kit’s arms in favour of looking at him. His eyes had that jarring softness in them again that Will had seen last night for the very first time.

“She left me a letter,” Will said. “She’s with Southwell. And she doesn’t want me looking for her.”  
“I know,” Kit said, and _of course_ he did.

“It’s killing me.”  
“But you’re not going to die,” Kit gave back, and Will spotted an old, guarded sadness at the corners of his eyes that he hadn’t been aware of until now. “It won’t disappear completely. But it will not tear you to pieces any longer. And then, once in a while, you’ll notice that you’ve almost forgotten about it.”

Will wanted to ask him how he would know, but at this minute, Kit was honest, and Will didn’t mean to cause him pain.

So he settled for a different question.

“How long will it take?”  
“I really can’t tell you,” Kit retorted; and then, out of the blue, he smirked. “But I do think you’re suffering in a perfectly sensible way for an artist, having ale, quill and paper as your companions. Which leaves out only the occasional debaucherous buggery I myself am so fond of. Though, maybe that is just not your thing.”

For a moment Will was thrown, unsure if that was supposed to be an invitation. Then, he remembered that he was talking to Kit, and that meant it was always an invitation. And then he was thrown again, because the idea of having Kit like _that_ , and just _forgetting_ about everything for a few hours, seemed an awful lot less repulsive than he’d thought back in the days of being forcefully kissed halfway up from a table, deceitfulness and malice dripping into his mouth.

“Probably,” he heard himself say, and then immediately stopped speaking, because that had sounded like an invitation in and of itself. One he wasn’t sure whether he actually wanted to give.

“Probably?” Kit repeated, a question, and Will’s stomach sank.

“I…no. No. Forget about it.”  
Kit was looking him up and down, and Will pointedly tried to not let his eyes drift to where he still wasn’t wearing a shirt. He had never really paid attention to how the angular, sharp lines of Kit’s body contrasted with the fullness of his mouth, the brightness of his eyes, harmonious in an eternal contradiction; and the fact that he was noticing it _now_ under Kit’s searching gaze, confused by the current workings of his own mind, was rather unfortunate.

“Have you ever been with a man, William?”

He didn’t answer, and didn’t look, and tried to make sense of himself, and failed.

“Ever kissed one?”

 _Apart from you?,_ Will meant to say, but didn't. _Kissing_ would have necessitated him kissing _back_ , after all, and thus Kit didn't count.

The thought left Will, and his eyes wandered to his hand, the back of which was now being caressed by Kit’s fingertips, as fleeting and tender as a bird’s wing. Kit Marlowe and tenderness. What a strange combination. Though, as of yesterday, not one unheard of.

To his own bewilderment Will didn’t pull away, just watched, mesmerized, as the fingertips danced higher on his forearm, then up, up, up, until they reached his clavicle, his jaw, his temple, where they pushed a strand of hair behind his ear, and disappeared again.

“Would you like to?” Kit finally asked, and Will looked at him. The fire in Kit’s eyes betrayed the nonchalant way in which he’d posed his question; and it struck Will like a lightning bolt that Kit _wanted_ this, more than he’d ever let on. And kissing him – kissing him didn’t seem like the worst idea Will had ever had.

“Yes,” he said, before he could develop any sort of fear regarding his own courage; and he hadn’t been wrong about Kit, who was a sudden presence in his space, a hand at his cheek, hot streams of breath against Will’s half-open mouth. The kiss was, like Kit’s fingers before, tender, an undemanding touch of lips on lips. What came as a surprise, however, was the cataclysm of want it sparked, want that made Will helplessly deepen it, teeth biting down on Kit’s lower lip, tongue demanding entry into his mouth; and it dawned on Will, hazily, that he still had a fair number of things to learn about himself.

When Will let go, he didn’t go too far, keeping his hands firmly set at the back of Kit’s head, who in turn had his hands fisted in the fabric of Will’s shirt, clinging on.

“I’d thought I’d misjudged you, when I first met you,” Kit said, and he sounded as out of breath as Will felt. “At one point I was sure you were open to seduction, but then you very clearly told me no.”

“Maybe your seduction just wasn’t very good?” Will proposed, and Kit gave a breathless laugh.

“Or maybe I didn’t try hard enough.”

Something hot coiled in Will’s stomach at Kit’s tone of voice, followed by a shiver and a moan, when Kit’s hand pushed his head back and his mouth started sliding over Will’s jaw, down his neck.

“Most likely the latter,” Kit added, before his tongue darted out to press slick, maddening kisses to Will’s throat.

Eventually, he stopped, one hand in Will’s hair, pulling him out of his desire-drenched haze for a moment and forcing him to look Kit in the eye.

“What do you want, Will? This day, at this moment, what do you want?”

Will thought about it for a while, but Kit never looked away.

“I want to forget,” he finally said. “I want to remember, too. And I want…not to feel like it all means nothing.”

Kit’s thumb was stroking Will’s temple, and the expression on his face told Will that he had understood, maybe more than any other person on earth would ever understand.

“I can do that,” he gave back, softly.

Will nodded.

“And what do you want, Kit?”

Kit smiled, and there it was again, that old, worn sadness gnawing at his eyes.

“Quite the same, Will. Quite the same.”

**Author's Note:**

> Should you have found a reference to "Romeo and Juliet" or "Hero and Leander" you are welcome to keep it :)


End file.
